A National Care Service for Scotland?

Coalition of Care and Support Providers welcome Independent Review of Adult Social Care in Scotland

CCPS (Coalition of Care and Support Providers) has welcomed the publication of the Independent Review of Adult Social Care in Scotland and its call for a renewed purpose for social care with human rights at its heart.

CCPS are delighted by the commitment to a new narrative which replaces crisis with prevention and wellbeing, burden with investment, competition with collaboration and variation with fairness and equity.

We strongly endorse the call to put people front and centre of social care delivery – people who are supported by social care, their families and carers, and people who work in social care services.

We agree that Scotland already has strong foundations on which to build a National Care Service. We want to work with the Scottish Government, national and local stakeholders – including those who support people and people who are supported – to redesign the system to make the ambitions set out in the Review happen.

We wholeheartedly back the Review’s assertion of a duty to co-produce a new system with people who it is designed to support.

Over the coming weeks we will be working closely with our members to explore the Review’s recommendations in detail. As the membership body for third sector providers, we are especially interested in participating in the conversation about the Review’s recommendations on commissioning and procurement.

In 2020, we published our own contribution to that conversation, a series of Big Ideas about changing the way social care is planned, purchased, and paid for. We are grateful to the Review team for citing those ideas. In particular, we thank them for including as one of their recommendations, our suggestion to press pause on all current procurement in the context of a National Care Service, with a view to rapid, carefully planned implementation.

We agree with the Review team that implementation is the most significant challenge. Now is the moment for whole system change, hand in hand with the implementation of The Promise and the recommendations of the Social Renewal Advisory Board.

We would echo the Review Team’s own words – ‘If not now, when? If not this way, how? And if not us – who?’

Annie Gunner Logan, Chief Executive of CCPS said: “CCPS congratulates Derek Feeley and the Review team on completing a mammoth task in record time and their willingness to listen to many voices including those of providers and the people we support.

“Reform of social care in Scotland is long overdue. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed fault lines which require radical overhaul and long-term change. It has also revealed what can be achieved when obstacles are removed in a crisis.

“We are heartened by the direction of travel set out in the Review. The challenge now must be to turn aspiration into implementation. Change is needed urgently but how it is achieved matters too.

“The debate about a National Care Service must not become a bunfight at the expense of those who provide social care and the people they support.

“The upcoming election period provides an opportunity to discuss the Review’s recommendations openly and widely. But when the votes have been counted, and Scotland gets down to the series business of design and implementation, their voices must be in every room, every step of the way.”

Responding to the publication of the Independent Review of Adult Social Care in Scotland Report yesterday, GMB Scotland’s Women’s Campaign Unit Organiser Rhea Wolfson said: “Scotland has a once in a generation opportunity to transform social care, if the recommendations of this report are underpinned by proper value for the workers who will deliver it.

“We are pleased the report acknowledges our campaign for a £15 an hour minimum wage in social care and we would stress to the government and the industry this is very achievable with collaboration and political will.

“The report is clear that if government and the industry invest properly in the sector and its people, the economic multiplier effects of social care spending could have transformative effects not just for workers’ pay and the quality of care, but for the equalities agenda and the wider economy.

“The COVID-19 pandemic ruthlessly exposed the long-standing crises in social care which everyone well understood, and for a workforce of mainly low-paid and often exploited women this has meant a chronic struggle for proper value and respect.

“After the crises and tragedy of the last eleven months, and with tough times still ahead of us, there is hope in these recommendations.

“If we are serious about what we really value as a society, then we have a chance to finally get the social care agenda right.”